Recognition does not cross a border. A brand people trust in one market arrives in the next as an unfamiliar name with a foreign domain, and the instinct is to buy attention until that changes. That is usually the most expensive available option and the slowest to teach you anything.
Borrow trust before you buy attention
At launch you have no audience, no local proof and no feel for which messages land. Paid spend in that state is tuition: you are paying for data you could have got another way.
Partnerships invert it. Instead of persuading strangers one at a time, you borrow the trust of an organisation those people already rely on. When BUNQ entered Spain, that was the route in — and the first two and a half months produced over a thousand new users.
Choose partners by overlap, not size
The common mistake is ranking partners by name recognition. A smaller organisation whose members are exactly your target is worth more than a large one whose audience merely includes them, because the second one converts at a rate that makes the deal pointless.
We build the landscape against overlap first and reach second. It produces a less impressive slide and a better pipeline.
A foreign company asking for a partnership is a cold email
The outreach problem is real. An unfamiliar brand from another country asking for a favour is the email most people delete, which is why we secured these meetings directly and had them face to face.
In-person has a second benefit: you find out quickly which partners were never going to move. That is worth as much as the ones who sign, because it stops you spending the next quarter on them.
Signing is the start, not the result
A signed partnership that nobody activates produces an announcement and nothing else. The work is onboarding, the co-marketing that follows, and tracking which partners produce actual users.
By the end, you should be able to say which partner types convert in this market and which do not. That read is the asset — it is what makes the paid spend sensible when you eventually turn it on.